International man of mystery and Hudson Institute fellow Richard Miniter visits the island of Akhtamar in Lake Van, Turkey, to see the newly restored Church of the Holy Cross - one of the holiest sites for Armenian Christians - for himself at the opening ceremonies: 

Our story starts with a small sandstone 10th-century Armenian church, on an uninhabited rock less than 500 yards wide, in a remote Turkish lake that changes colors like moods and sometimes bubbles like soda. If you had seen the ruins of it, as I did in 2000, you might cry. Its roof was gone. Its bas-reliefs, chiseled by master carvers a millennium ago, of Adam and Eve, of saints and kings, were wearing away in the wind. It was an empty husk that had not heard a Mass in more than 90 years. 

In March, after years of painstaking restoration, Turkey reopened the church as a museum. Among the ambassadors and visitors at the opening ceremonies, I roamed the grounds. The building is now magnificent. Its roof is restored and its reliefs cleaned. 

After noting that Armenian Christians once made up a third of the population around Van, Miniter dutifully gives “both sides of the story” about why there are few Armenians still living in Van today: 

While most Turkish historians concede there was a massacre of Armenians (while pointing out that Armenians slaughtered Turks from 1890 to 1915 and that most Armenians were relocated, not slain), they hesitate to call it genocide. The Armenians do not hesitate - and sometimes compare it to the Holocaust.    

Unfortunately, Miniter’s knowledge of history is a bit spotty, because the period of time that Armenians are supposed to have been slaughtering Turks coincides with the Hamidian Massacres from 1894 to 1897 and the Adana Massacre in April 1909, a year after the Young Turks seized power in a military coup. According to various estimates, between 80,000 to 300,000 Armenians were slaughtered in the Hamidian Massacres, and another 20,000 to 30,000 in the Adana Massacre. Armenians were not indiscriminately murdering Turks; they were protecting their families and their villages. 

The Great Massacres were followed by the Armenian Genocide, the systematic annihilation of Armenian men, women and children meant to finish the job Sultan Hamid started. In fact, Miniter’s story does not start with the restoration of the Church of the Holy Cross, but with what happened to the Armenians of Van – and how the monastery fell into ruins. 

Here, an excerpt from “The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War,” by architecture and design critic Robert Bevan (Reaktion Books Ltd., 2006):

After a period of beatings and deaths, the genocide began on 23 April 1915 with the rounding up and murder of thousands of Armenian community leaders. Systematic mass murder followed throughout Turkey. Men and women were often separated and the men murdered immediately or sent to death camps, such as those at Ras-Ul-Ain and Deir-el-Zor. Those who survived the sadistic deportations were forced into permanent exile. Armenian churches, monuments, quarters and towns were destroyed in the process. Some Armenians were burned alive in their places of worship. …

In the genocide whole cities lost their Armenian populations, including the historic Armenian city of Van. More than 50,000 Armenians were killed and the city itself was almost entirely flattened (apart from two mosques) and the new Kurdish city of Van rebuilt nearby. Armenian property not destroyed during the massacres was transferred to the ownership of the Turkish state in September 1915. …

A survey, not in itself comprehensive, prepared in 1914 by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople listed 2,549 religious sites under its control, including more than 200 monasteries and 1,600 churches. Many were destroyed in the process of the genocide but many more have since been vandalized, flattened or converted to mosques or barns. In contrast to Kristallnacht, where the destruction of architecture offered a warning of worse to come, the Turks have continued to remove, stone by stone, the evidence of millennia of Armenian architectural and art history following the mass murder and exile of the Armenian people. … [Note: Emphasis throughout, The Stiletto’s.]

Bevan’s central thesis is that throughout history, crimes against humanity have been followed by attacks on architecture (what he terms “cultural cleansing”). Not content to have stolen the future of the Armenian people by very nearly destroying their entire gene pool, the Ottoman Turks and their successors sought to erase all traces of this ancient people’s past from the region. Had they succeeded, it would have been as though the Armenians never existed; in time, their cities and monuments would have been the stuff of legend, like the lost city of Atlantis. 

Miniter praises the “spirit of compromise” that led to the restoration of the structure as a museum, not a house of worship (imagine, the Church of the Holy Cross has no cross!). Turkey is 99.8 percent Muslim and its remaining Armenian population of roughly 60,000 does not feel free to live and worship openly as Armenians and as Christians (video link). What Miniter mistakes as compromise is more accurately described as resignation.   

Editorial Note: According to Bevan, the Church of the Holy Cross was restored only after years of international pressure and was accomplished with Armenian money - not funds from the Turkish government, as Miniter has it in his article.

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